Handwriting is traditionally performed on a writing surface, such as paper, with an ink-dispensing pen or other writing instrument, such as, a pencil or paintbrush. The result is expected to be understandable by human readers.
Recently, electronic handwriting has been done on planar X-Y digitizing pads using a stylus employed to simulate handwriting upon the pad to create an electronic facsimile of handwriting. The digitizing system collects an array of X-Y coordinates of pixels corresponding to the curve tracing positional points of the stylus tip. Usually, the X-Y arrays are gathered and stored as positional arrays and are made discernible to a human reader when rendered on an X-Y display, but the arrays are rarely discernible as text by a device.
Attempts to make handwriting discernible as machine-readable text have concentrated on handwriting recognition of the X-Y traces by translation into binary coded text after affine transformation of the X-Y trace. Other techniques of recognition of the X-Y traces employ stochastic recognition based on various randomness assumptions using a statistical model. Other attempts with more deterministic techniques of recognition of the X-Y traces use velocity profiling in on-line recognition and forward search in batch recognition. Many similar X-Y trace recognition efforts have resulted in numerically intense algorithms, which tend to restrict the recognition process to off-line batch processing conducted as a separate procedure long after the writing has been done.
More recently, on-line recognition systems have dispensed with natural handwriting and created specialized pen-stroke shorthand for letters of the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals and punctuation marks, such as an electronic stylus recognition system, for example. Field experience has shown that recognition error rates are high enough to cause manufacturers to begin supplanting the system with keypads and software keyboards. Miniaturized keypads are slow when compared to normal handwriting speed. Full-sized keyboards, although faster in use than miniature keyboards, are too cumbersome for optimum purposes.
Devices that track X-Y motion in true geometry exist in the form of analog joysticks. These are used as actuators for simulation and as gaming input devices where a hand-held game controller may incorporate an analog joystick that permits tracking of directional inputs over 360 degrees around an action reference point and is small enough to be manipulated by a fingertip. The cited range of 360 degrees signifies that the joystick spans a projection of the X-Y plane, but does not span a radial distance, i.e., the joystick is not operable to span a projection along the Z-axis. This is because the range of each joystick sensor is less than the radial range to be spanned.
The joystick may utilize sensor wheels over two orthogonal axes of rotation. Such a configuration may suffice for directional control over a planar range, but is inadequate for capturing natural handwriting strokes, which require a depth sensor and measurement.
At the time of Charles Babbage, the person attributed with inventing the analytic engine, a predecessor of the modem-day computer, a computer was a person whom Babbage observed working at Napier's logarithm table workshop in France. Napier's workers each sat upon assigned desks and specialized on one base-10 place value for the computation of historical six-figure logarithm tables.
Babbage adopted that concept, applied it to mechanical screws, and built a device that mechanized Napier's procedure to nearly thirty place values, and developed precision screws and gears that could be driven in tandem at a 10:1 gear ratio. This brought into existence the concept of a machine register.
Babbage also borrowed from the Italian textile industry of the time. The punch cards employed by the mechanical pattern knitting looms of the day were employed by Babbage to mechanically provide a numeric register value to an analytic engine. The use of punched cards for formulating arithmetic problems for analytic engines was publicized by Ada (Lady Lovelace), a Babbage acquaintance who took an intellectual interest in the Babbage invention.
Hollerith was inspired to create a tabulating machine (a punched card device) that was used in a first-ever major census undertaking of post-civil war United States. The Hollerith system dominated computing for the next century and brought into existence the International Business Machine Company (IBM).
The manner by which the Hollerith system operated was to input data into the analytic machine (computer) by transcribing information onto punched cards. The IBM encoding scheme that persists to this day is called the extended binary coded decimal interchange code. Once the data was punched into the cards, the cards would be appended to a computer program. Punched program cards were preceded by control cards for performing batch-computing jobs. This procedure evolved into a unique culture of mainframe computing.
After a century of the Hollerith method, a console for mainframe computing included a command and control work area overseeing the work of card readers, print queues, and a host of system administration tasks for numerous batch jobs that were being executed at any particular time. From this concentration of control arose a replication of what was then relegated to peripheral control devices (PDP) for overseeing communications, printing, and other I/O functions.
The now-defunct Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) refined the PDP into independent computing machines, free from the constraints of a mainframe, and defined what is now historically known as the minicomputer era. One departure, however, was in the adoption of variable record lengths. The mainframe imposed 80 column records universally, which was the standard length for punched cards.
DEC also defined a series of terminals, derisively termed dumb terminals by mainframe users, which only controlled an output text display and input text keyboard. The virtual terminals (VT), as they were then known, brought about a new mode of using computers, namely through a text entry command line. The host computer would invoke a command interpreter and the user would enter commands with strict syntax and semantics. The premier example of this was the DEC command language (DCL) facility used on VT terminals, for example. The most rudimentary terminal in the series was the VT-100 DEC terminal.
Concurrent with this development, new research initiatives arose for interactive computing, most famously, the international academic and industrial collaboration called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (MULTICS). The MULTICS effort, subscribed to by competitors of IBM, attempted to make the features of mainframes generic.
Out of the MULTICS research initiative arose, within AT&T Bell Laboratories, a much narrower interaction model, appropriately called Uniplexed Information and Computing System (UNIX®), in which the computer kernel only did one thing, i.e., multiplex concurrent tasks on one computer with a scheduler. UNIX® adopted a number of interactive computing features of DEC-PDP machines, while retaining the more useful generics of MULTICS. The most salient of these features to users was the shell command interpreter, which became the standard for command-line interactive computing.
When console displays became capable of a real layout of text, the interaction model evolved from a command line to a menu screen. An interactive program would present a menu screen of available commands and a user would select commands using various typesetting keystrokes to lead the typesetting cursor to the text of a desired selection and send a directive for invoking that command by hitting a transmit key.
The transmit key of the console arose from telecommunications, telegraphy in particular, wherein a terminal that looked like a typewriter had a typesetting carriage return and line feed where typed text was entered. The transmit key served that purpose, in telecommunications, and was adopted as the command key for text screen menu systems.
It is appropriate to note that DEC-VT terminals also adopted the American Standard Code for Information Exchange (ASCII) for inter-computer communications. Independent TeleType manufacturers whose premier products were also named TeleType developed the ASCII standard.
UNIX® developers also incorporated the DEC adaptations into their computing models, wherein a terminal may be identified as a teletypewriter (TTY). It may also be noteworthy that the UNIX® implementation of terminal screen addressing of a typesetting cursor are found in appropriately named cursor utilities.
As UNIX® workstations began supplanting minicomputers, solid-state miniaturization and large scale circuit integration techniques gave rise to retail-affordable microcomputers, primarily led by Apple Computer Corporation, using the BASIC computer language interface for programmers and users and a control program/manager (CP/M) for console services.
At this point, IBM developed a new microcomputer product, the IBM-PC, and employed Microsoft, a young CP/M Basic software developer and vendor to provide critical microcomputer applications for the IBM-PC. The BASIC language interface sold by Microsoft was largely derived from DEC Basic, upon which the Microsoft start-up had cut its teeth. At the point IBM required a Disk Operating System (DOS) helper for the IBM-PC, Microsoft adopted a variant of the Digital Research Inc.'s CP/M DOS Helper (later known as DR-DOS), and the standard interaction terminal on the Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS) was given the capability of VT 100 terminals and an ASCII interchange code convention.
When graphics-capable microcomputers became retail affordable, a new interaction model came into being. Pointing devices were introduced into computer interaction. Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was combined with research at Xerox Corporation into a windowing computer system predicted by psychology researcher Dr. Licklider of MIT decades before. A number of aspects of the interaction paradigm first appeared on text command screens.
The location of main commands at a top row of the screen and the display of abbreviated command options immediately below a selected main command for a temporary period of time, for example, a pull-down menu, and reservation of the remainder of the screen for the application interaction data was adopted. When graphics was added to the pull-down menu system, the ability to reserve an area of the screen with a graphics icon of what had been a text command label brought rise to the personal computing model named Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pull-Down System (WIMPS).
Apple Computer adopted the graphics windowing computer model of Xerox® into their Macintosh® computer, and when graphics capability became common to IBM-PC's, IBM® launched their Presentation Manager® under a multitasking PS/2 successor to DOS, while Microsoft launched a competing Windows® system. To date, windowing systems dominate the interaction paradigm.
The WIMPS paradigm has been elaborated by specialization, such as for example, dialog control, text editing control, selection list, combo-box control (combination of text and list) in text applications, and features, such as for example, overlay, panning, and zoom magnification and retraction. The areal icon selection for menus and controls was refined further in engineering drawing graphics applications as a snap behavior, wherein the pointer mouse/digitizer cursor was allowed to capture a nearby graphic feature into a prevailing context where having the user exactly point at the minute feature location was not practical.
In brief the historical computing sequence starting with Napier is as follows: Napier: human arithmetic computing with working desk register and handwritten input and output; Babbage: mechanical arithmetic computing with a machine register; Ada: programming with punched cards; Hollerith: batch data processing with punched cards; TeleType: interactive typewriting keyboard; DEC: interactive computing console; MIT: human computer interaction pointing devices; and Xerox: window interaction computing using console with pointer mouse.
Over two decades of evolution of window interactive computing, many applications for computing have emerged in addition to the WIMPS paradigm. The earliest was the accounting spreadsheet, followed soon after by the clerical word processor. When graphics became available to applications, engineering drawing followed. When graphics animation became possible, simulated games came into common use. As communications have become more pervasive, interactive models have also become remote, wherein remote geometric spatial computing has been applied to robotics, and telecomputing, as in telemetry and telemedicine, for example.
The mainstay of user interfaces in all these applications continues to be WIMPS. Because a chirographic system in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention may specifically be designed for use as a handwriting device and a graphical marking device, the chirographic system may be adapted to provide an opportunity for converting the Napier computer into a fully computerized model by employing similar tactile operations as those that Napier relied upon.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art through comparison of such systems with embodiments presented in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.